Saturday, May 25, 2013

Will Irish courts take phone hacking seriously?

There's a remarkable story in today's Irish Independent
about a woman whose criminal charges were struck out - without even a
conviction - despite having been found guilty of listening to her former
supervisor's voicemails. From the article:

A CIVIL servant who was found guilty of spying on her former supervisor
by hacking into her mobile phone's voicemail messages has escaped
punishment.

Dublin City Council employee Severine Doyle
(39) had pleaded not guilty to 11 charges under the Postal and
Telecommunication Act. However,
following a hearing last June, she was found guilty of intercepting
voice messages on a phone used by Teresa Conlon, Dublin City Council's
head of housing allocation.

Dublin District Court heard that Ms
Conlon's voicemail messages had been intercepted over a five-week
period, from January 8 until February 11, 2010.

Doyle's sentencing
had been adjourned until yesterday. Judge Eamon O'Brien told defence
solicitor Declan Fahy: "I will strike it out with liberty to re-enter. I
am giving her a chance, the ball is in her court."

During the
trial on June 28 last year, Ms Conlon told the judge she found out that
some city councillors had said they had listened to tapes of messages
left on her phone.

This is an unusual outcome. The offences established carry a possible sentence of 5 years if prosecuted on indictment or 12 months otherwise.
There were multiple incidents of phone hacking over an extended period.
There was no guilty plea. The offences were aggravated by dissemination
of the recorded material to councillors. Despite all this, the case was
struck out. This may not have been a case for a custodial sentence, but
I see no reason why a conviction shouldn't have been registered to mark
the gravity of the offence. While there may be more to the matter than
emerges from the media coverage, on the face of it this is a case where
the court has failed to give adequate weight to the right to
privacy in communications.